The first chapter of the book “The Love of Art “ is titled “Signs of the Time”, the authors explore the understanding of art . The authors explore from a perspective of religion where they reference two groups of art lovers, the fundamentalist and the modernist. The fundamentalist simply look ate the venue and the instrument used to bring forth a piece of art while modernist are into more details. The author compares the fundamentalists to the class of society members who essentially are “simple people who believe without argument”.
The second chapter titled “The Research Process” is mainly an exploration of a research conducted by the three authors on museum publics. The research was conducted using simple questionnaires and a sample of 21 museums selected from the more than 200 museums in France. Using this research, the authors seem to suggest that contemporary aesthetic theory of art presumes naivety for art styles that are constantly changing. The authors suggest that members of the public who belong to the upper classes are not in any advantaged by their education or early art lessons and are in fact on the same footing with museum visitors belonging to lower social classes, although the two factors are indeed determinants of museum visiting patterns.
In the third chapter titled “The Social Conditions of Cultural Practice”, the authors explore some of the implications of the research and try to find the reasons of some of the trends observed. For instance, the authors try to look at the empirical relationship that exists between museum visiting and one’s social class or education level. Some of the factors that the authors attribute to this relationship for instance are entrance charges and general interest or cognitive comprehension of the pieces of art on display in the museums.
References
Bourdieu, P., Darbel, A., & Schnapper, D. (1990). The love of art: European art museums and their public. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
